adobe photoshop 5.0

It's been well over a year since Adobe launched its flagship product Photoshop 4 and now they are at it again with the latest incarnation of everybodies favourite image manipulation application. Photoshop is part of every designers way of life, in fact Photoshop is fast becoming an institution among pre-press guru's. Many have tried to upsurge the king of the graphics world, some have come close but now Adobe has moved the goalposts with version 5 and once again storms out in front. If you are a serious designer, digital photographer or an artist in the FX industry then this is an upgrade worth every penny.

New features at a glance:

• Multiple Undo's
• Actions greatly improved
• Spot colour channels (DCS 2.0)
• Editable Text
• Magnetic Lasso
• Magnetic Pen
• Freeform Pen
• Much improved Colour Support
• New measurements tool
• 16 bit channels

The main toolbar has a few new additions. A live preview allows you to see your text on your image in realtime. Click for a closer look.

When you first launch 5 it does not seem all that different to the previous version, the tools and default pallets all look the same, but on closer inspection you will find subtle but powerful changes.

The main tool bar has two new entries: under the paintbrush tool there is a history brush and beneath the pen tool there is the measurement tool. The Pen tool has two new additions, named simply, magnetic pen and freeform pen. These allow the user to fine select items of a graphic with a lot more speed and precision over version 4. The freeform pen works like any other freeform drawing tool, you draw round your object with the mouse (or tablet) and Photoshop converts your line into a bezier curve which you can push and pull to manipulate, very much like Freehand 8's freeform tool. Many people bought specialist mask plug-ins to do the very same thing as these new tools were designed to do, a pat on the back goes to Adobe for incorporating such features that will enhance the capabilities of users that create a lot of masks.

Photoshops text tools were, in previous version very poor. Extensis with their Phototools plug-in remedied this to some extent, but now, Photoshop has fully editable text with a live preview. These text layers can be transformed, skewed or manipulated as much as any other layer although you cannot apply filters (from the filters drop down menu). If you need to change something later, then just double click the text layer (the one with the capital T on it) and retype your text. If you wanted to add a font with ATM or Suitcase while using Version 4 of Photoshop, you had to quit the app before you could use the new font. Not any more. Just hold down the shift key when you click on the text tool and Photoshop rebuilds the font list.

If you wanted to create a drop shadow prior to version 5 you had to mess around with layers, or buy a special filter like Andromeda, Black Box or Phototools, now Photoshop has its own drop shadow feature that takes the best of those plug-ins and rolls them into one requester. What you can do is create drop shadows to text or other items on a layer and then manipulate the text or layer itself, Photoshop now has the intelligence to follow the layers around the screen whilst keeping the drop shadow settings that you have specified. You can use all of these effects in conjunction with Photoshops own dropdown modes.

• Drop Shadow
• Inner Shadow
• Outer Glow
• Inner Glow
• Bevel & Emboss

The actions pallet was a good thing when it was introduced in version 4, but Adobe has listened to its users and greatly extended what you can record with actions. Most things can now be made into an action including the use of layer manipulation, creation of text and even masking which were previously impossible with version 4.

The curves and hues pallets have had a revamp also with added functionality for color adjustments and corrections. Photoshop 5 now supports 16 bits per channel and you can have up to 24 channels with spot colors assigned to them, when you save in DCS format the likes of Quark or Freehand will import and separate them correctly, users of Platemaker will be throwing their arms up in fury, they don't need it any more.

The history palette.

The major gripe from Photoshop users has always been one level of undo, that has completely changed in version 5 with multiple undo's. Photoshop now uses a history pallet to record each step that you take, you can go back to any step and undo it or use the history brush to make minor edits. A much needed improvement and a one that will see heavy use by just about everyone. The only limitations to the history is the amount of memory that you have but now Photoshop supports up to 4 scratch disks.

Adobe has also spent time on improving the speed of Photoshop, everything feels that bit quicker and things like resize, crop, rotate have been optimized for the new generation of G3's. Unfortunately some things have changed and the change that I spotted straight away was the change in shortcut keys. To change the eraser tool you used to press E and cycle through, now its shift E, why change it when the letter E has nothing assigned to it. Its the same with the pen tool (shift P) and others.

There are a lot of minor additions as well as the major ones including support for ICC profiles, batch processing, contact sheets and numerous others. In conclusion I must admit that Adobe has once again showed its strengths in its latest release and the upgrade is a must for serious users.

supplier	Adobe Systems Inc.
web site	www.adobe.com
price	US $995
system requirements	Windows Intel Pentium processor or faster Microsoft Windows(R) 95, Windows NT(R) 4.0, or later operating system 32 MB of RAM installed 80 MB of available hard-disk space 256-color display adapter card CD-ROM drive PowerMac PowerPC processor System software 7.5.5 or greater 32 MB of application RAM 80 MB of available hard-disk space CD-ROM drive

Written by Paul Younghusband - paul.yhb@dial.pipex.com.


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